Norman George Heatley

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

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Norman George Heatley, British biochemist (born Jan. 10, 1911, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.—died Jan. 5, 2004, Oxford, Eng.), devised a way to isolate penicillin from its substrate and measure its activity and was instrumental in proving the efficacy of the antibiotic and creating the means to mass-produce it. Heatley was a member of a team of scientists at the University of Oxford that included Ernst Chain and was headed by Howard Florey when in 1939 the team began looking into Sir Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery of penicillin. Heatley, a resourceful inventor, found the assay method to measure the activity of penicillin, discovered the conditions under which the antibiotic is stable, and devised a multistage technique to extract and purify penicillin. In 1940 the team produced enough penicillin to test it on mice, and the following year, after Heatley had invented a method to produce sufficient quantities of the substance, the first human test was conducted. Heatley was appointed OBE in 1978, and in 1990 Oxford awarded him its first honorary doctorate in medicine.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Karen Sparks, Director and Editor, Britannica Book of the Year.

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